PROJECTS

ABC

The U.S. Federal Air Marshal Service program has reached what critics describe as an acute crisis point marked by a recent rash of suicides, psychotic episodes, a murder-suicide, a bomb plot, devastating health problems and a pervasive sense of dread and depression among the ranks of the most elite cadre of marksmen and women in the nation, according to a month-long ABC News investigation into the secretive federal agency.

ABC

A skeptical panel of appellate judges peppered Cosby's attorneys with challenges to their arguments, while barely interrupting a pair of prosecutors during oral arguments in Cosby's appeal.
State law bars uncharged criminal accusations from trials, but prosecutors convinced a judge of an underlying pattern of "prior bad acts." Cosby has had dozens of sex assault allegations made against him recently.
The strategy is also being tested elsewhere. A New York judge is deciding whether to allow additional accusers to testify to uncharged crimes against Harvey Weinstein.

ABC

When Jeffrey Epstein was born in January 1953 to working class parents living in a rented, second-floor apartment on Maple Avenue on New York City's Coney Island, no one could have predicted the extraordinary heights of wealth to which he would climb as a Wall Street money manager.

Nor could anyone have predicted the depths to which he would plunge from that privileged perch.

The #MeToo movement has unearthed numerous, shocking allegations about the abuse of women by powerful men, but no case to date has surfaced such a damning set of allegations as those now leveled against Epstein.

ABC

Prosecutors in Nantucket on Wednesday dropped a felony sexual assault charge against the actor Kevin Spacey, after watching their case against the actor slowly fall apart under scrutiny from Spacey's defense team during months of contentious pre-trial hearings that unfolded in the resort island's lone courtroom.

The criminal case against Spacey appeared to be plagued nearly from the start by one stunning revelation after another about missteps by the case investigators, the prosecutors and the alleged victim's relatives and civil attorney.

ABC

Three years to the day after a boozy encounter in a New England summer resort bar, the young man who has accused actor Kevin Spacey of felony sexual assault that night appeared publicly for the first time and testified in a Nantucket courtroom on Monday.

Partway through his testimony he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, Spacey's accuser confirmed under questioning from the actor's lead defense attorney that he did not report the alleged assault to police for 15 months, rather than the three months prosecutors have been contending since filing charges in January.

ABC

The key witness in the criminal sexual assault case against Kevin Spacey filed a civil lawsuit against the actor on Wednesday, injecting fresh intrigue into a case already fraught with more mysteries than clues.
The civil filing caps a whirlwind month in which a key piece of evidence went missing and the judge in the case ordered the accuser's family to appear in court after the Fourth of July holiday weekend to explain its disappearance.

ABC

The man who has accused actor Kevin Spacey of sexual assault could be ordered to take the witness stand next month in a pre-trial hearing, after the court learned this week that a key piece of evidence -- the cell phone he was using to text friends about his alleged encounter with Spacey in a Nantucket bar in July 2016 -- is missing, according to newly-filed documents in the case.

ABC

Wendy Oxenhorn was born the day blues harmonica great Little Walter died, and she said that a little part of her has always liked to believe that “maybe somehow I caught a molecule of his passing.”

Decades later, the longtime executive director of the Jazz Foundation of America (JFA) has left a mark on the world of American jazz and blues nearly as vivid and indelible as the wail of Walter’s harp.

Yet now, Oxenhorn herself is facing a medical challenge more daunting than any of her work at the foundation, but she's not afraid.

ABC

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is bringing hired guns to a courtroom knife fight.

Kraft was hit w 2 misdemeanor counts of soliciting and paying for sex acts at a Florida spa . Local DAs typically offer let 1st-time offenders pay a fine, perform community service, while not admitting fault.

Kraft has pleaded not guilty and opted for a non-jury trial, before a judge -- while recruiting a trio of high-profile defense lawyers. But there may be a more costly reckoning for Kraft looming beyond the courtroom: The NFL.

ABC

A convicted child sex offender who has allegedly been tied by DNA evidence to the scene of a brutal 2002 murder of a young West Virginia woman got away with the crime while four men were wrongly convicted, according to defense attorneys who submitted their evidence to prosecutors more than a year ago without a response or any legal action.

Later this month, the convicted child sex offender will be released from prison after serving two years in a prison in Ohio. Court records indicate that he is serving time for raping and impregnating a 12-year-old girl.

ABC

Long before mass media, a city’s newspapers were its chief sources of information: its champions, entertainers and story-tellers -- exposing corruption and abuse and peddling eye-popping gossip, sports scores and sensational crime.

The careers of Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, two of the most colorful, talented newspaper columnists of the late 20th century, are the subject of a new HBO documentary.

The film is a romantic, unsentimental elegy to the last generation in American print journalism when newspapers really, truly mattered.

ABC

High-profile attorney Michael Avenatti is a professional race car driver who appeared frequently on television news programs, tangled with the president on social media and briefly flirted publicly with the prospect of running for president himself in 2020.

Avenatti’s visibility on the national stage has grown substantially in the past year. Yet in roughly the same time frame, his personal and professional legal disputes seem to have been steadily dragging him towards a significant financial reckoning.

ABC

The nation’s largest police force said Tuesday it is adding drones to its crime-fighting arsenal.

The move is particularly significant benchmark for U.S. law enforcement agencies because smaller police departments often follow the lead of larger, big city forces like the New York Police Department.

“The NYPD has a trailblazing effect when it comes to new technology and almost all aspects of policing,” said Christopher Dickey, author of “Securing the City: Inside America’s Best Counterterror Force," which chronicled groundbreaking technology innovations under former commissioner Ray Kelly.

ABC

Does Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren really have Native American blood running through her veins?

It's scientifically impossible to know for sure, according to a collection of leading geneticists, industry experts, research scientists with expertise in indigenous genetics and Native American leaders who spoke with ABC News.

The process of tracing one's ancestry is still evolving, geneticists told ABC News, and efforts to establish genetic affiliation with an indigenous group like Native Americans are at best thorny and uncertain, and, in the extreme, offensive.

ABC

The U.S. Department of Defense is working with a Silicon Valley startup to fine-tune a crystal-clear, two-way radio so small it clips to your tooth.

The device, nicknamed the "molar mic," is designed to transmit an encrypted, wireless signal clear enough to whisper in a hurricane and hear back with equal clarity -- all inside your head, with no earpiece.

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